Patterns for Consumer Trust in Electronic Commerce

Since the mid-1990’s the psychological and sociological concept of trust has received increasing attention in the field of electronic commerce by many scholars and was recognized as one of the main reasons why a high number of consumers are still reluctant from buying on the Internet. During about the same period of time the idea of design patterns and pattern languages, originally developed in the field of architecture, was adopted by several humancomputer interaction researchers and usability experts to create a common terminology, in order to be able to communicate on design problems and generate solutions for them. However, the notion of applying the pattern approach to the studies of consumer trust in electronic commerce has been practically unexplored by scholars so far. In this paper we overcome this gap, synthesize findings from both areas, argue for the development of a pattern language for trust in electronic commerce and present a first set of sample patterns to illustrate our idea.